Photo of the Week #336

February 10, 2025
Everything comes together so perfectly in this picture that it seems like the photograph itself has a personality. Helen Levitt's photographs of chalk drawings never fail to charm, and they are a key part of the development of her photographic practice.

While teaching at a school in East Harlem in 1937 for New York City's Federal Art Project, Levitt began to carry a camera in order to document the fleeting chalk drawings that neighborhood children would make on the walls and sidewalks. In an urban environment where most photographers of her generation would have taken a social documentary approach, she chose instead to create images like this, that revealed the kinship between modern art and the creative freedom of children's drawings.

In 2000 Laurence Miller Gallery partnered with Helen Levitt and used her original negatives to create new enlargements like this one, that in many cases yielded life-size images. This scale of print furthers the connection between those works and modern paintings of the period.

As the pentimenti of past erasures testifies, this drawing was likely wiped out and drawn over soon enough, but in the world of Levitt's photograph the spontaneous line work that seems to show a woman looking out of the frame is preserved, like a drawing behind glass.